BACON, Sir Francis.

Instauratio magna [Novum Organum].

London: Joannem Billium, 1620.

First edition, first issue, of Bacon’s plan for the total reconstruction of human knowledge on experimental and inductive foundations — the Devonshire–Horblit–Garden copy, and one of approximately fifteen copies printed on large paper with the crown watermark. Of the six parts projected, only the first two were ever completed; the present volume is the second, in which the method of the whole is set down. The first issue, published in October 1620, is rare in any paper, and the large-paper state in the first issue rarer still. On the evidence presently available, this is one of only two first-issue large-paper copies to have appeared in commerce in living memory. The book is dedicated to King James I, to whom Bacon had presented a manuscript draft in October 1620 with a letter explaining that he had laboured at the work for almost thirty years and that the king’s acceptance was the only reward he sought. James, on receiving the volume, is said to have remarked that it was ‘like the peace of God, which passeth all understanding’. The presentation copy to the king has not survived; the present copy is thus among the very small number of large-paper copies that did, and the only one to have descended through Devonshire, Horblit, and Garden.

The 1620 Instauratio magna appeared in two issues. The first issue, of which the present copy is an example, carries Bonham Norton’s name in the colophon beside that of John Bill, and retains an uncorrected pagination and a number of errors that the second issue would set right. Gibson records the existence of large-paper copies of both issues; ESTC specifies that roughly fifteen copies of the first issue were printed on large paper with a large crown watermark, measuring about thirteen inches in height, the remainder of the edition being printed on a smaller paper bearing a jug watermark and measuring about twelve inches. The large-paper copies were printed last in the sequence of the first issue, so that all but one of the pagination errors were corrected in them, together with two of the errors subsequently listed in the second-issue errata. In some large-paper first-issue copies — the present among them — leaf e3r (beginning Non abs re fuerit admonere…) is numbered 37; in others the numbering is suppressed. In the second issue, leaf e3 is cancelled and the text reset on e4r, an errata leaf is added, and Norton’s name is removed from the colophon. The present copy thus belongs to the latest-printed and best-corrected state of the first issue, on the distinguishing paper stock, with the full Norton imprint preserved. ESTC locates ten copies of the first issue in the United Kingdom and twelve in the United States, without distinguishing paper stock. ABPC/RBH records since 1975 only two other copies of the first issue (a large-paper copy in a presentation vellum binding at auction in 1996, and the Honeyman copy, not stated to be large paper), together with two large-paper copies of the second issue.

Bacon’s Instauratio magna — the Great Instauration, or renewal — was conceived as the total reconstruction of human knowledge on experimental and inductive foundations, in six parts, of which only the first two were ever brought to completion. Part I, a survey of existing knowledge and its gaps, appeared in 1623 as the De Augmentis Scientiarum, a greatly expanded Latin recasting of his English Advancement of Learning of 1605. Part II, the book offered here under the running title Novum Organum — the New Instrument, set deliberately against Aristotle’s Organon — presented the new logical method by which true knowledge was to be acquired. Part III, intended to collect the natural and experimental histories that would supply the raw material for inductive inference, appears in the 1620 volume only as the prefatory Parasceve ad Historiam Naturalem et Experimentalem. Parts IV, V, and VI — worked examples, preliminary speculations, and the new philosophy itself — were never written. Bacon understood the Novum Organum as the working core of the entire programme: the part of the Instauratio in which the method of all the rest is laid down, and without which the other parts cannot be attempted. The frontispiece, engraved by Simon van de Passe, places a ship in full sail passing outward through the Pillars of Hercules — the classical boundary of the known world — into open ocean. The device is the book in miniature: the old philosophy is the inland sea, the new is the Atlantic.

The Novum Organum proper is divided into two books of aphorisms. Book I opens with a diagnosis of the obstacles to true knowledge — the four classes of idola, or illusions, to which the unreformed intellect is natively prone. The idols of the Tribe arise from common features of human nature itself — the tendency to anthropomorphise, to impose pattern on disorder, to read purpose into process. The idols of the Cave arise from the peculiar history, education, and temperament of the individual. The idols of the Market-Place arise from the ambiguity and inadequacy of the words through which thought is transacted. The idols of the Theatre arise from received philosophical systems — Aristotelian, Platonic, Galenic — which impose a fictional dramaturgy on the world. Until the mind has been purged of the four, Bacon argues, it cannot receive truth from nature; the effort of the Instauratio is therefore at once logical, psychological, and religious, a tabula abrasa on which nature itself may write. The theological motif is sustained: the reformation of the intellect reverses the effects of the Fall, restoring the human capacity for dominion over creation that was forfeited in Eden.

Book II of the Novum Organum presents Bacon’s inductive method as applied, by way of worked example, to the investigation of heat. The aim of the method is to discover the form of a simple nature — by which Bacon means not an Aristotelian essence but what later philosophy would call an explanation or a reduction: the arrangement of primary qualities from which the secondary quality in question is generated. The form of heat, Bacon concludes, is a motion — expansive, restrained, and acting in its striving upon the smaller parts of bodies. The route to this conclusion runs through three tables. The Table of Presence collects instances in which heat is manifestly present — the rays of the sun, flame, boiling liquids — chosen to be as unlike one another as possible so that the nature they share may stand out against irrelevant commonalities. The Table of Absence collects matched instances in which heat is absent — the rays of the moon, phosphorescence, cool liquids — to eliminate candidate forms that fail the negative test. The Table of Comparison collects instances in which heat varies in degree, requiring that the true form vary with it. Between them the three tables function as an analytic sieve: a putative form survives only if it is present when heat is present, absent when heat is absent, and co-variant with heat where heat is graded. The structure anticipates by two centuries John Stuart Mill’s Joint Method of Agreement and Difference, and is radically more discriminating than induction by simple enumeration. Construction of the tables demands not passive observation but the active interrogation of nature through designed experiment — nature, in Bacon’s phrase, must be put to the question.

Inference of the form from the tables is, however, only the first stage. Bacon envisages a progressive ascent from individual forms to what he calls the ladder of axioms — successive levels of generalisation that together compose the unified system of natural philosophy. The conception has something of Aristotelian classification (genus, species, differentia) about it, and something of the later idea of a theoretical structure from which observations follow by deduction; but Bacon’s ascent is emphatically not the hypothetico-deductive method. His axioms are the guaranteed products of properly conducted induction over properly contrived tables, and the whole programme depends on his conviction that the simple natures of things are finite in number and exhaustively enumerable — that the primary qualities of bodies constitute a closed alphabet from which the variety of the world is assembled as a literature is assembled from letters. Where the senses cannot reach the relevant qualities directly, Bacon commends what he calls aids to sense: instruments such as the telescope, and what he terms fit and apposite experiments designed to bring hidden processes within observational range. Nor is the ascent to axioms the end of the labour. Bacon insists that the programme is sterile unless the axioms are returned to practice in what he calls the descent to works — the application of inductively secured knowledge to the amelioration of the human condition. Science is understanding, but it is useless understanding unless it issues in dominion.

The significance of the Novum Organum in the history of scientific method lies in its explicit commitment to observation and experiment as logically prior to theoretical construction, rather than as downstream confirmation of conclusions already reached by deduction. The standard pre-Baconian practice, widespread in Bacon’s own time, was to treat experiment as illustrative of a result antecedently established — Robert Boyle, an admirer of Bacon, would later note of Pascal’s hydrostatical demonstrations that they are physically impossible to perform and were plainly conceived as thought experiments in service of an already-decided theory. Bacon inverts the sequence: the experiments come first, the tables come next, the axioms come only at the end. Not all the experiments reported in the Novum Organum are Bacon’s own, but a substantial number are, carried out in the fields of chemistry and mechanics (very likely, after the manner of Boyle and other gentleman-philosophers, through the physical labour of laboratory assistants under his direction). Bacon distinguishes carefully between experiments he has performed and accounts he has received at second hand, and he engages directly with contemporary technology — the instance of experiments on compression and expansion in bells is linked openly in the text to the diving-bell technology then being deployed for salvage operations. This intimate engagement with applied science and craft practice is the practical counterpart to the theoretical methodology.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626), statesman, essayist, and philosopher, was the younger son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Elizabeth I. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of twelve and was admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1576. A legal and parliamentary career under Elizabeth brought only modest advancement, but under James I he rose through the offices of Solicitor-General and Attorney-General to become Lord Chancellor in 1618, with the titles Baron Verulam and Viscount St Albans in successive years. In 1621 he was impeached by the House of Commons for accepting gratuities from litigants, stripped of his offices, and confined briefly in the Tower; the last five years of his life, spent in enforced retirement at Gorhambury, were among the most productive of his career and saw the publication of the Historia Naturalis et Experimentalis (1622), the De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), and the posthumous Sylva Sylvarum and New Atlantis (both 1627). The Essays, first published in 1597 and enlarged in 1612 and 1625, remain the aspect of his literary output most familiar to general readers. Bacon’s direct scientific contributions are slight — he made no observation and proposed no result of enduring importance — and he was notably indifferent to the major discoveries of his contemporaries, mentioning Gilbert, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Napier, and his own physician Harvey only glancingly or not at all. What he contributed was a programme, and the programme proved decisive. His insistence on the priority of experiment over authority passed through his English admirers to Locke, through Locke to the whole subsequent tradition of British empiricism, and through the translation projects of the Encyclopédistes and the polemical essays of Voltaire into the intellectual armoury of the French Enlightenment. In 1660, one generation after his death, his programme would be institutionalised in the founding of the Royal Society, whose early fellows — Boyle above all — adopted him as their patron and methodological sponsor.

Provenance: William Cavendish, 2nd Duke of Devonshire (1672–1729), bookplate on the verso of the title; the Cavendish library at Chatsworth was among the foremost English collections of the eighteenth century, and the volume is very probably the copy entered in the 1879 Chatsworth catalogue at 1:103. From Devonshire the book passed to Harrison D. Horblit (1912–1988), whose science collection — formed in the 1950s and 1960s and dispersed at Sotheby’s London over 1974–1978 in five parts — was, with the Honeyman, the Norman, and Streeter collections, among the major twentieth-century American libraries of early science; the book appeared in his first sale (10–11 June 1974) as lot 68, with Horblit’s book label. It was purchased there by Lew David Feldman (1906–1976), proprietor of the House of El Dieff (named for his initials, L. D. F.). Feldman’s successors sold the book in March 1977 to Haven O’More and Michael Davis, who assembled over the following decade The Garden Ltd. — a library distinguished for the exceptional condition of its holdings, described in the foreword to the Sotheby’s catalogue as one of the finest of its kind to come to market in the twentieth century. The collapse of O’More’s business arrangements forced the Garden sale at Sotheby’s New York on 9–10 November 1989, at which the present Bacon was offered as lot 84.

Beyond its contribution to scientific method, the Novum Organum opened a political and institutional horizon for natural philosophy that its contemporaries read clearly. The New Atlantis of 1627 would extrapolate the Instauratio into fiction, imagining Salomon’s House as a state-supported research institution devoted to the enlargement of the boundaries of human empire; the Hartlib Circle and the group around Boyle and Wilkins that gathered in Oxford and London through the 1640s and 1650s drew directly on both texts in their own institutional plans; and the Royal Society, chartered in 1662, took up Bacon as its presiding intellectual figure. Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667) placed him at the head of its lineage.

References: Dibner, Heralds of Science 80 — PMM 119 — Norman 98 (large paper, second issue) — Grolier/Horblit 8b — Pforzheimer, App. 1 — ESTC S120789 — STC 1162 — Gibson, Francis Bacon: A Bibliography (1950), 103a — Jardine and Silverthorne (eds.), The New Organon, Cambridge, 2000 — Rees and Wakely (eds.), The Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. XI, The Instauratio Magna Part II: Novum organum and Associated Texts, 2004 — Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, 1968 — Peltonen (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, 1996.

Folio (334 × 208 mm), [xii], 172, 181–360, 37, [3] pp., including engraved title by Simon van de Passe, woodcut headpieces and historiated initials; small cancel slip correcting a preposition (de for de de) in the last line of T1r; in the second set of numbered pages, the misnumbering of pages 27 and 30 has been corrected; first issue, with Bonham Norton’s name in the colophon, on the large paper with the crown watermark, leaf e3r numbered 37; with blank c4 but without the first and last blanks (some marginal soiling and spotting). Contemporary calf gilt (neatly rebacked). Housed in a red cloth box with ties. An excellent copy in a contemporary binding.

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Item #5962

Price: $437,500.00